The Devil is in the kudzu, and Satan has surfaced in the swamp this week on the Big Show.
Ashley, meanwhile, contentedly slips his mint julep on the front porch. Swinging back and forth as the breeze comes up off the river, he admires the moonlight and magnolias.
"Repent, sinners! Jesus is calling!" Brother Cletus is working up a full head of steam at the revival tent at the edge of town.
Cries of "Hallelujah!" emerge from the Amen Corner, as the church ladies out back prepare to serve up temptation once the Holy Ghost has put in a good night's work. Not Demon Rum but, instead, the shameless hussy Blackberry Cobbler.
DOWN THE ROAD, some good ol' boys get loaded on Demon Bud. Up the creek, somebody's out running a trot line. In the city, a banker has supper at the Club.
In the 'hood, a murder will end up as a local brief in the newspaper.
At the family restaurant out on the highway, a black server greets an old white lady as "Honey" and they embrace in a big hug. On an Internet sports board, an SEC fan complains about how the "n*****s" got Confederate flags banned from the local stadium. The Civil War wasn't about slavery, he types. Facts is facts.
On campus, the conservative college kids rail against the liberal college kids. The progressives berate the reactionaries. None of them understand their parents. And parents don't understand their kids, whose private-school educations didn't come cheap.
MEANWHILE, the angels keep watch over the neighborhood, as Miss Betty stops to chat with Miss Bertha, and Mr. Joe has a fistful of quarters for Junior to play video games while he chews the fat with Senior at the Quick Shop.
Tiger fans, if you're looking for the College World Series in Omaha, Oklahoma, you're going to miss the game. But what do you expect of people in Baton Rouge, Mississippi?
What does it take for a newspaper to get the story -- or graphic, as the case may be -- right? Let's see:
Veteran reporter: $55,000. Graphic artist: $40,000. Single-copy of The Advocate: 50 cents.
Naw, I guess this was a joke, too. Jes' tryin' to make that Yankee coach look silly, with all his big tawk about us not knowin' the Civil War's over.
Crazy sumbitch think the war's over!
FUNNY THE THINGS you find when you're directed to the UC-Irvine athletics site to see the picture of the "good" LSU baseball fans waving American flags to greet the Anteaters at Alex Box Stadium in Baton Rouge.
Funny, didn't the LSU administration tell fans they'd really, really, really rather they didn't bring purple-and-gold Confederate battle flags on campus?
And didn't fans get the idea that the battle flag tended to rub minority students the wrong way? Of course, some fans couldn't have cared less . . . not that they didn't know the War of Northern Aggression was over or anything, according to this 2006 Associated Press story:
BATON ROUGE, La. -- The flag blends a symbol of the Confederacy with the school colors of Louisiana State University, a combination that provokes anger from blacks and creates headaches for the university.
Black students held a string of game-day protests last year -- the largest attracting several hundred participants -- to demand that the school prohibit fans on campus from flying the banner, a Confederate-style flag in the purple and gold of the LSU Fighting Tigers. The protests resulted in a few scuffles and a lot of attention in the news media -- but no ban on the flag.
This year, the protest organizer is taking a different approach: Instead of protest marches, senior Collins Phillips said he's planning pregame tailgate parties near Tiger Stadium. Beginning with the season opener on Saturday, Phillips said the parties will aim to encourage students to discuss the different meanings the flag carries: from pride in the South to the shame of slavery.
"If we were to march again this year, I think it would be a little redundant. People would say, 'There they go, marching about the flag again,'" he said.
University officials consistently rebuffed Phillips' demands for a ban on the LSU-themed Rebel flag, saying a ban would infringe on First Amendment rights. But while those who like the flag consider it a symbol of both LSU pride and Southern heritage, the school is opposed to the idea of merging its colors with what is also a symbol of slavery.
"We have an intolerance of the display of this symbol, a fundamental rejection by the university, of the use of university colors to even vaguely imply that we would tolerate or endorse this display," said LSU chancellor Sean O'Keefe.
The school has no restrictions on flying the flags on campus, but O'Keefe released a letter Friday asking fans to leave them at home.
"We will not impede the constitutional right of free speech by banning this flag, but we ask that it not be flown on the LSU campus," the letter said.
The school also sent letters to wholesalers and local retailers, asking them to stop selling the flag -- and strongly implying that the stores could be frozen out in the future on the lucrative sales of franchised LSU flags, banners and other items. The flags retail in some stores for $35. To wholesalers, the school sent letters indicating that the flags -- with their taint of racism -- could cause the value of LSU's trademarks to drop, O'Keefe said. The letters included the veiled threat of a lawsuit.
The result, O'Keefe said, has been a sharp drop in the sales of the flags.
"These are serious businesspeople. They get the picture," O'Keefe said.
The owner of one Baton Rouge flag shop said he stopped selling the flags at LSU's request. Byron Smith, owner of the Flag Shop, added that the flags weren't big sellers anyway -- until Phillips started his protest campaign last year.
"I started getting calls like crazy" after the protests began, from people requesting the flags, Smith said.
Phillips' protests drew wide coverage on local TV news and front-page stories in The Advocate, the local daily. Before the homecoming game, three people were arrested for allegedly throwing objects at the roughly 200 protesters. Phillips said he and other demonstrators were spat upon and called racial slurs.
Phillips, 23, a general studies major focusing on communications and African-American studies, takes pride in publicizing the fact that a large chunk of the population considers the flag a symbol of slavery and racism.
ISN'T THERE ANYTHING ELSE to take Southern pride in, apart from a lost cause to preserve a "peculiar institution"?
I'm asking, because I well know how central veneration of that lost war was -- is? -- to one's very identity as a Southerner. After a century and a half, we don't break out the slur "damn Yankee" for nothing when a non-Southerner offends us.
Really, we can talk about honoring our heritage, and our fallen ancestors, and Southern pride, and blah blah blah blah till Gen. Robert E. Lee rides back from the dead atop his beloved Traveller . . . but what does it say about us that we still venerate a war fought to preserve a way of life predicated on enslaving the Negro race?
By what mental and spiritual gymnastics do we turn what is objectively shameful into the source of our "Southern pride"? Again, I'm asking, because it took me a mere four decades of life -- and almost half of it away from the orbit of Southern groupthink -- to ask some quite basic questions on this topic.
HAVE WESOUTHERNERS become nothing more than America's Serbs? And is Louisiana the rowdy, dysfunctional corner of a rowdy, dysfunctional homeland?
Or am I just a disloyal, so-called LSU fan? And a damn Yankee turncoat bastard, to boot.
From the comments, some brave soul crawls out from beneath his (or her) rock to reveal what a skid mark he be on the knickers of humanity:
Anonymous said... My, The Holy Lord Most Almighty God must REALLY be pissed at y'all to keep sending His Wrathful Tornadoes at you the way He is!
What'd y'all do - vote to allow Gay Marriages or something?
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAA!
(and if you think I'm being crude in the face of tragedy - need I remind you that Y'ALL are the same exact way every time we have an earthquake in California? Guess you hypocrites don't ever REMEMBER doing that, though, DO YOU?)
11:07 AM
YOU KNOW, there are loonies behind both front lines in the Kulturkampf, but it takes a special brand of jackal to actually revel in a region's misfortune and in the death of four of its children.
And, as we learned this morning, three of those dead children were from Omaha.
So, "Anonymous," here's to you. Now, go to hell.
Then again, I suppose someone such as yourself already occupies a hell of his own making.
There's nothing like responding to an insult . . . by living down to it.
There's nothing like taking a stereotype . . . and giving it new legs.
There's nothing like being too bloody stupid to realize that the nation isn't laughing with you, but instead is laughing at you. Well, dat's Loosiana for you! IT ALL STARTED when California-Irvine's baseball coach, Mike Gillespie, gave an interview to the school's hometown paper. In that interview, Gillespie compared Louisiana State's fans to Nebraska fans -- and not in a positive light:
Gillespie said the LSU fans will be different from those UCI encountered at Nebraska.
“That was pretty electric,” Gillespie said of Saturday night’s crowd of 8,646 at Haymarket Park that witnessed UCI’s 3-2 win over the host Cornhuskers. “It was a sea of red, but they’re not a hostile group,” Gillespie said of the Nebraska faithful.
“They’re not on you, and they’re not rude and they’re not vicious and they know the Civil War is over and they know how to act,” Gillespie said, before backtracking somewhat. “Now, I don’t mean to suggest [that is the case at LSU] I really don’t.”
YES, HE DIDMEAN to suggest every word of it. And then some LSU fans set out to prove the man right.
Now it's all over the Internet exactly how right Gillespie was . . . and, to a degree, he was right. Stupid to say it to a reporter but pretty much right, nevertheless.
Nebraska fans are some of the classiest in the nation -- no, the classiest in the nation. For as long as anyone can remember -- after the clock ticks down to 00:00 -- fans at Memorial Stadium have given the visiting team a standing ovation.
Win, lose or draw.
Even Oklahoma.
BY COMPARISON -- unless half-drunken chants of "Tiger bait!" can be considered a warm, loving welcome for visiting teams and fans -- this cannot be said of LSU. And unless hearty greetings of "F--- (fill in the blank)!" are considered non-hostile behavior, my experience with LSU home athletic events (and even some away games) tells me that Gillespie wasn't completely full of beans.
Ask any Nebraska football fan brave enough to follow the Huskers to either the 1985 or 1987 Sugar Bowl where, each time, the opponent was . . . LSU.
I remember the 1987 game well, because I was there. And my wife is a Nebraska alumnus.
It's an amazing -- and amazingly unpleasant -- thing to be on the wrong end of "Tiger hospitality" in the Big Easy. But why believe me? Believethe postgame story from The New York Times:
The key sacks came from Broderick Thomas, the end, and Danny Noonan, a consensus all-American middle guard, on the last two plays of the third quarter after L.S.U., trailing 17-7, had taken over on the Nebraska 17-yard line following a blocked field-goal attempt
A defensive tackle, Neil Smith, a New Orleans native, said the motivation for Nebraska came on the first night in town, when nine players and two graduate assistants were arrested in the French Quarter for disturbing the peace, charges which were later dropped.
''A lot of guys say they were mistreated and didn't want to come back,'' Smith said. ''I felt like we needed to give them a bonus to get them to want to come back.''
Noonan, one of those arrested, said the incident was influential in the Huskers' performance. ''I think that only helped us,'' Noonan said. ''We got fired up. The people treated us like dirt.''
AND LET'S NOT FORGET the treatment Tennessee received when the Vols came to Tiger Stadium for a 2005 weeknight game in the wake of Hurricane Rita.
So, the UC-Irvine coach told the truth as he saw it during an unguarded moment. As it happens, the truth as Mike Gillespie saw it was pretty close to the truth as it actually is.
Of course, there are a great many polite, gracious and welcoming Tiger fans. Those may even be a sizable majority. The problem is an inordinately large minority of hateful, rude, profane and -- yes -- racist jerks.
Monday evening, in response to Gillespie's "disrespecting" of the locals, a couple of these morons thought making a joke of the Civil War would be a real knee-slapper. Which kind of proved the Anteater coach's point about Louisianians not knowing the Civil War ended in 1865.
The loss of a generation of Southern men might be the stuff mirth is made of back home . . . and the deaths of 600,000 Americans might be 900,000 too few for some LSU fans who seek a best-of-three smackdown . . . and the fact that my homeland made chattel of human beings and thought it so good it fought a war to, among other things, preserve its "peculiar institution" might be damned funny to some Tiger fans, but that crap isn't going to fly here. Or across most of America.
To summarize -- just in case Baton Rouge didn't get the memo -- the Civil War wasn't a laughing matter. And it's still not.
I can't imagine that LSU's African-American students were amused by the baseball "joke." Neither, I imagine, was most of Baton Rouge, where white folks happen to be in the minority.
AS A NATIVE of Louisiana and an alumnus of LSU who now resides in the United States, maybe I'm the person to inform Tiger fans of one cold, hard fact of life -- your act is wearing thin.
And this one . . . this one includes a YouTube video that renders the "humor" of the Alex Box Stadium "Civil War" banner null and void. Out here in America.
In case you don't want to follow the links, here's the video, shot in January before the BCS National Championship in New Orleans:
LET ME lay this out for folks from my home state -- particularly those who plan to make the trip to Omaha this week to cheer on our Tigers.
I was born and raised in Louisiana. My family had been around Baton Rouge for a generation before Jefferson struck a deal with Napoleon, and I know that my hometown (along with the rest of the "Florida Parishes") didn't join in on the fun until 1810.
One of my great-great-grandfathers lies in a Confederate grave at Port Hudson, La. Another died in the Battle of Atlanta. Somehow, I don't think a "two out of three" Apocalypse would sit well with them.
I know "Fergit, hell!" In fact, in elementary school, it came as something of a surprise to me when I first learned the South lost the war.
Having grown up in a milieu where it was possible to not know the South lost the war, it is no surprise that I also know segregation . . . and know what racism looks like when I see it. And I know the Alex Box Stadium ha ha banner was sick sick inappropriate.
YOU DON'T come up with that kind of stuff -- even as a joke, even to tweak a loudmouthed opposing coach -- without making a very basic assumption that LSU is a "white" school and the Tigers are a "white" team. Despite the African-American players on it.
That kind of sick conditioning is something you fight, for the rest of your life, to overcome. First, however, one has to recognize it's sick. Then one must decide to resist the sickness.
Obviously, judging by at least one LSU fan site, folks down on the bayou are struggling with the first part of the equation. The "it's sick" part.
"America's original sin" sure has staying power. More than 140 years after the South's "peculiar institution" died a violent death, people just can't confess that dirty little secret everybody already knows.
Not after the South started a war that damn near destroyed it.
Not after it lost most of a generation in that war.
Not after a century of Jim Crow, that de jure attempt to undo the 14th Amendment south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Not after the civil-rights movement and several acts of Congress finally killed ol' Jim Crow.
Yeah, the Civil War. Best two out of three. Ha ha. A joke.
A joke built upon the corpses of a mountain of martyrs.
TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH, it would have been a lot funnier if LSU officials had given every fan walking through the gate a little American flag. War over . . . and Mike Gillespie looks like a fool instead of looking vindicated.
That's probably how it would have gone at Haymarket Park in Lincoln. And that's exactly why at least one Louisiana expatriate now calls Nebraska home.
And as a Nebraskan, and an Omahan, this native Baton Rougean has one thing to say to my fellow Tiger fans: Leave your "funny" banners and some of your other "peculiar" notions back in the swamp. They're not welcome here.
There were about 100 Boy Scouts at the tornado-struck camp 50 miles north of here in Iowa. No basements.
Television reports say the entire camp was leveled. Around 40 of the 100 injured; four confirmed dead. KETV cited officials who said many of the injured have head wounds.
The scouts were on a weeklong campout. And now the whole camp is gone. Gone.
The storms that struck Omaha Sunday caused damage only to homes, trees and property. Wednesday night’s storms that sprung up from Lincoln to western Iowa took lives.
One tornado, according to Harrison County dispatchers has four fatalities and up to 30 to 40 injured.
According to an Omaha city official, at least one of the groups of scouts at the camp was from Omaha
Mercy Medical Center in Sioux City will be getting two young juvenile males by medical helicopter right around 8 p.m. from the tornado that touched down at the Little Sioux Scout Ranch.
Parents are to call 431-9272 for information on injuries.
Shortly after 9 p.m., parents who had gathered at the Fellowship Hall in Little Sioux had yet to learn who had been killed and who had been injured.
A state trooper told parents he would deliver a list of names as soon as possible, but the scene at the Boy Scout camp was chaotic. He asked for their patience.
More than 100 people were gathered at the hall, a one-story brick building, and many more were streaming in.
There were numerous reports of damage and tornadoes touching down in Lincoln but nothing confirmed yet as of 7:45 p.m. said Kerry Eagan, chief administrative officer for Lancaster County.
Mike Krysl, a spokesman, for Mercy Medical Center in Sioux City, said the hospital in full-scale disaster alert. Krysl said he did not know the extent of the two juvenile's injuries.
A tornado has destroyed several buildings at a Boy Scout camp in southwestern Iowa, killing four and injuring 30 to 40 others, according to a report on KETV, Channel 7 in Omaha, which cited information from the Harrison County emergency dispatch center.
The scout camp -- the Little Sioux Scout Ranch, just northeast of Little Sioux, Iowa -- was filled with Boy Scouts for a summer event.
This comes as a virtual freight train of tornadic thunderstorm continues to rake eastern Nebraska and western Iowa. Tornado sirens have been going off in Omaha throughout the evening, as one tornado warning is replaced by another before it can expire.
This is the worst night of weather amid a couple of solid weeks of horrific weather. All of Douglas County (Omaha) -- as well as numerous other area counties -- also are under flash-flood warnings, with creeks rising fast and reports of street flooding incoming.
The lights are starting to blink. Gotta run if I want this to post.
UPDATE: Boy Scouts, according to Channel 7, have confirmed four deaths. Damn, it's hailing and I hear a roar.
UPDATE 2: OK, the hail has pretty much stopped here in west-central Omaha and the wind seems to have calmed down a bit for the time being. But we're getting torrential rain, and there's reports of creek flooding all through the west side of town.
Millard, which got whacked by a tornado early Sunday morning, is flooding in spots. Likewise, Papillion Creek, which runs through west and central Omaha, is flooding -- causing at least one car to flood out at 90th and Center streets.
I have rested atop that boy's sweaty-ass head for the last 20 years, through thick and thin -- and I'm mainly talking about your blogmeister's hair, here.
Can somebody's head be "sweaty-ass"? Just wondering.
Anyway, where was I? Aiiight.
AHEM. For the last 20 years, I have adorned the Mighty Favog's incredibly ugly head, which -- whether it technically can be sweaty-ass or not -- has a tendency to expel copious amounts of smelly saline solution on hot days at the ball park. As you can see, that has taken its toll on me.
It didn't make it any easier that for years at the College World Series, I had to witness things like Ben McDonald getting shelled like Omaha Beach by the Texas Longhorns in 1989. My Tigers had a habit of getting to Omaha, but not being able to get over the hump.
FINALLY, in 1991, the Favog and I sat for a week in general admission, watching LSU tear through the CWS field. We liked those old metal stands just beyond first base at Rosenblatt Stadium, because if you wanted a drink -- or if you just had to go -- you could save a lot of time by climbing down the sides . . . and then climbing back up again.
Try that today, buddy, and they'll have your ass in handcuffs. Wait, that didn't sound exactly right. You know what I mean.
I remember we were sitting in the grandstand for the championship game against Wichita State, and after the final out, with the Tigers victorious, that stupid idiot picked up Mrs. Favog and started spinning us all around like a top. I thought we were going to fall down about 3 million stadium steps.
AND I REMEMBER two years later, when we were back in the first-base cheap seats and the Long Beach State fans thought they were about to send LSU home. Eliminated. "Start the bus! Start the bus!" was what they chanted at us.
Bottom of the ninth. Three runs. Tigers win, then go on to beat Wichita State (again) in the championship game.
In 1996, things got kind of blurry -- not to mention dizzifying and deafening -- when Warren Morris hit that bottom-of-the-ninth, two-out line drive that kept going until it had cleared the right-field fence. I saw the ball go out . . . and then I was flopping all over as that idiot owner of mine kept throwing me and waving me and whacking me on stuff. Then -- yet again -- picking up the wife and spinning.
I thought we were going to die. And you wonder why I look like I do now.
I was there at Rosenblatt when LSU won in '97, too. This one Alabama fan was really unamused by our "Around the bowl and down the hole! Roll, Tide, roll!" cheer. And we were there in 2000, too, when Stanford got a little Tiger payback for Paul Carey's walk-off grand slam in 1987. And, of course, we were there -- Mr. Cap Abuser and me -- through all the just-miss years and a couple of years of abject CWS humiliation during the Smoke Laval Era. Enough said.
Really, I don't want to talk about it.
SO NOW, after a four-year absence, Paul Mainieri has our Tigers back in Omaha -- the Omaha where we live, and the Omaha where Fathead's wife's dad worked for three decades to make the College World Series a local institution. (OK, so your Idiot Blogger married up . . . and married well. Lots of people can marry a higher class of wife, you know?)
I imagine the boy will be back in the stands come Sunday, cheering on his alma mater. While Mr. Expatriate has famously conflicted feelings about Louisiana and his hometown, Baton Rouge, there is no ambiguity in his rabid support of LSU baseball and football.
Frankly, I don't know if I will make it this year. I am old, and I am tired. I have seen better days, obviously, and my appearance seems to horrify Mrs. Favog. I mean, I'll try, but my stitching ain't what it used to be . . . and Fathead's noggin hasn't gotten any smaller over the decades.
Judging by my aching seams and sweatband, the boy ain't a size 7 3/8 anymore.
So, if I see you, I see you. If I don't . . . well, I'll always have my memories. In the ball yard of my mind, I'll always have Rosenblatt's left-field bleachers -- the old ones -- the Twizzler Man and "Share with your neighbor. And don't be stingy!"
Whoever is in charge of moderating website comments for WOWT -- Omaha's Weahehhehhehther Authority -- never, EVER ought to be hired for any job involving screening inmates' mail.
Ever.
SOME CHANNEL SIX VIEWERS, writing in the comments of the Omaha City Weekly Media Watch blog, complained the station's webmasters were censoring any negative comment concerning WOWT's bungled coverage of early Sunday's EF-2 tornado.
One reader noted his criticism of the station and chief meteorologist Jim Flowers, though measured and respectful, never made it into the website's comments section.
Apparently, WOWT staffers were too busy assigning blame to everyone but themselves for the station's inability to do what competitor KETV did -- provide live coverage as the storm bore down on the city -- to deal with negative comments.
THAT'S WHY a combox warrior has to be wily in these cases.
Likewise, it helps to get an assist from station personnel too harried or too dense to crack a really simplified version of a jailhouse code. In fact, the code "Ron from Omaha" used to breach the station's Pleasantville Firewall was so simple it required no key to decipher it -- just a sharp eye.
And sharp eyes must be something in extremely short supply at Channel Sux. Here are the messages(you read the words typed in all CAPS . . . that's how simple the code is):
Posted by: Ron Location: Omaha on Jun 9, 2008 at 02:34 PM CHANNEL 6 is to be commended for not being EMBARRASED to tell it like it is about how ITSELF AND others had no lead time to know about the bad weather. Many people FAILED to see the tornado in OMAHA. IT IS PATHETIC, people, THAT JIM FLOWERS of everyone in Omaha is STILL the only one on the air who HAS the guts to tell us how people came so close to dying in their beds because of the freakish nature of this storm. Telling the truth is HIS JOB, and I'm glad Jim does it so well. Posted by: Ron Location: Omaha on Jun 9, 2008 at 04:36 PM Robyn says it all. WOWT could not know that bad weather was coming when the weather bureau FAILED to tell the station's meteorologists -- who weren't there anyway -- that there might be severe weather in OMAHA. I don't think it's right that WOWT should be BLAMED by some OTHER PEOPLE who didn't have weather radios, FOR its all THEIR OWN FAULTS. WHAT A BUNCH OF LOSERS! i'm going to FIRE back at these naysayers with the truth, which JIM FLOWERS so bravely told people to-day. WOWT, you're my favorite station. And all the whiners should HANG IT UP. don't SURRENDER YOUR moral high ground to these nattering nabobs of negativism. don't give them such LICENSE!
FISH. BARREL. FIREARMS.
And when swirling clouds of death and destruction bear down on our homes and loved ones, we count on these jokers to warn us that danger is nigh.
Among the impressive clot of refrigerator magnets on our old Kenmore (Really, I think standing near our refrigerator might relieve the pain and stiffness of arthritis.) is an old one from Channel 3 -- another station that was half an hour late and a sawbuck short early Sunday.
The magnet, back from when Action 3 News was KM3 News, listed "3 Things Every Kid Should Know" -- what county we live in, what's a tornado watch, and what's a tornado warning.
Maybe all the Omaha broadcasters -- save Channel 7 -- could pool their depleted budgets and go in on an updated version of that KM3 relic. It could add a fourth item, after the explanation of "tornado warning." Maybe something along these lines:
If you're counting on us to tell you a tornado's coming, follow these simple instructions. 1) Put your head between your legs. 2) Kiss your ass goodbye.
Exactly 24 hours ago, I was in our basement at the computer when all hell broke loose outside.
I've always been a night owl, and at about 20 after 2 Sunday morning, I was thinking of turning in after finishing up with some E-mail.
THE MISSUS, who had been dozing in the Big Blue Chair, was getting ready for bed herself. It just so happened that the living-room TV was on Channel 7, and that Channel 7 happened to have meteorologist Chuck McWilliams on duty as a line of storms bore down on the Omaha metro.
And it just so happened that my wife noticed that McWilliams had broken into programming to warn that a storm he'd been eyeing on its trek across eastern Nebraska was about to hit far southwestern Omaha with unexpected violence.
It had suddenly gone tornadic. The National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm warning at 2:22 a.m. The tornado warning followed at 2:26 a.m. The tornado sirens went off just as the tornado -- an EF-2 -- bore down on our neighborhood.
My wife ran downstairs and I ran upstairs -- to grab Molly the Dog, who was trying to hide behind the Big Blue Chair.
WHAT I DIDN'T KNOW as I ran back down to the basement, with Molly the Dog in my arms and with the sirens blaring, was that the tornado was right over our neighborhood, having lifted off the ground about a mile and a half from our house.
It had plowed into the Millard area of Omaha nine minutes before the tornado warning went out. The only warning anyone had -- at least apart from that telltale freight-train roar before your roof disappears -- was a two-minute heads up from a junior weatherman pulling an all-nighter at KETV, Channel 7.
The sirens were too late because the tornado formed too suddenly.
Channel 3 was no use because no one was there, no one or nothing but an automated crawl across the bottom of the TV screen. Ditto Channel 6. And multiply Channel 6 by Channels 15 and 42.
You know what 3 times 6 times 15 times 42 equals? Nothing.
Thank God for Channel 7 -- and for Chuck McWilliams drawing the short straw Saturday night.
Just as I got downstairs with Molly the Dog, the cable went out. Remember that, by this time, a 2½-mile stretch of southwest Omaha already was a patchwork of downed trees, arcing power lines, missing roofs and blown-apart houses.
MINDLESS INSTINCT directed me to a battery radio, which I switched on for . . . well, I can't tell you why because I knew what I'd find. Nothing.
On KFAB, Omaha's news-talk leader . . . commercials. On the stripped chassis of news-talk KKAR -- which, if it were a car, surely would be missing its engine, its wheels and would be resting on concrete blocks -- there was something from the satellite.
On all the FMs . . . fugeddaboutit. Wait, I think there might have been a live person on Z-92 reading the weather bulletin after a few minutes had passed.
We went back to the crippled television, changed the channel from cable 9 to over-the-air 7 and watched Chuck McWilliams through the snow.
After a few minutes, KFAB and the rest of Clear Channel's Omaha stations came to life with some sketchy live weather coverage . . . as the storm was getting ready to cross the river into Iowa. KKAR also finally came to life -- well, as much life as KKAR ever comes to, being that it barely has a staff.
By the grace of God, nobody died in Omaha in the wee hours of Sunday morning. A few close calls and a couple of minor injuries -- but no body bags, thank the Lord.
The only carcasses strewn about town in the storm's wake were those of the city's radio and TV stations. Well, all but one.
Then again, the tornado had nothing to do with those fatalities. The storm merely exposed the corpses.
IF YOU WANT to see the death notice for American radio, I think I may have run across it Sunday night on NebraskaRadio.com.
Deane Johnson isn't a newspaperman, and he doesn't play one on TV. But as a retired Top-40 program director who used to work for the legendary Todd Storz back when radio was IT, the man knows an obit when he hears one in the street after his neighborhood has just been hammered but good:
Saw a group of neighbors out in the street talking. Joined them. What were they talking about? You won't believe it. They were talking about how you couldn't depend on KFAB any more for information and couldn't watch TV because the power was out. If I were running a station like KFAB, these things would scare the bajeezus out of me.
BETRAYED LISTENERS scare today's pilots of the airwaves? Feh!
Now if the neighbors were investment bankers. . . .
When the president of a local school board decides that, no, public education isn't necessarily a public obligation, I'm not sure how much further a community has to go before it hits rock bottom.
THAT'S WHERE the court of winners and wretches finds my hometown -- in a nosedive and still pushing the yoke and throttle hard. If it's indeed true that a strong community is one of proverbial "brother's keepers," Baton Rouge surely bears the mark of Cain.
Not that I'm completely surprised or anything.
Why would the president of a public school board -- such as East Baton Rouge Parish's Jerry Arbour -- say, in effect, "We give up. We can't educate your kids properly. Take the state's money and run"?
Communities outsource things like collecting garbage, not educating their children. Public funds need to go to entities accountable to taxpayers as a whole, not to entities accountable to God-knows-whom (or what) or, perhaps, accountable to no one at all.
Why would communities not insist upon adhering to such a basic principle?
Well, for one thing, because it's hard. And because, first, some sort of commonweal must exist. Individuals must find it within themselves to bond themselves irrevocably to others on some level beyond that of the clan . . . or Klan, as the case may be.
John Deaux must, somewhere within himself, find the strength to be his brother's keeper. Even if that brother is a minority, or poor, or just not all that edifying to be around.
You'd think folks in the Bible Belt would be more serious about biblical principles. But we are talking about Louisiana.
AND WE ARE TALKING about the Deep South here. We are, after all, talking about a region where -- historically -- the electorate hasn't cared much for education, and what care it had was for "white" schools. "Nigger schools" got what was left over from those slim pickings.
In state after state, community after community across the South -- and, to be fair, in many urban areas outside the South -- we have seen a familiar progression from the earliest days of school desegregation.
First, a federal court steps in to order the integration of public schools long under the unequal and unjust yoke of de jure segregation. Then, after much fulminating by local pols and sometimes violent outrage on the part of the public, a token effort is made at "integration." Usually, this involves the admittance of a token number of minority students into "white" schools under the banner of various "freedom of choice" schemes.
Of course, after some time, a federal district judge would deem such tokenism as wholly unacceptable. Baton Rouge's stab as such foot-dragging proceeded at a grade-per-year snail's pace, and had not yet reached the elementary grades by the time the federal judge had enough in 1970.
Then -- at least in Baton Rouge's case -- "integration" was to be achieved through voluntary majority-minority transfers and through a "neighborhood schools" plan. That's right, going to your own neighborhood school constituted race-mixing progress.
Except that white folks either a) fled what previously were mixed areas of town, b) fled the public schools or c) both. And the "integrated" schools largely weren't.
Finally, fed up with segregated "integrated" public schools, federal courts then turned to the B-word -- busing. That, of course, led to an explosion in the numbers of private schools, particularly in Baton Rouge. And to a population explosion in "whiter" outlying areas.
As the public schools, under "forced busing," went from majority white to majority black -- and from majority middle-income to majority lower income -- the white exodus picked up steam, with previous holdouts fleeing what they now saw as "failing schools." I'm not sure, but I think the difference between acceptably mediocre and "failing" is somehow proportionate to the percentage of African-American (and underclass) students.
Now -- almost three decades after "forced busing" began and several years after it was deemed pointless and abandoned along with the 47-year deseg case -- my hometown school district has gone from 65 percent white to 83 percent minority. Whites, once a strong majority in Baton Rouge, now make up less than half the population.
Until Katrina flooded Baton Rouge with those fleeing New Orleans and southeast Louisiana, the city's population hadn't grown in two decades.
THAT'S THE HISTORY of these things, and I would imagine Baton Rouge's troubled transformation mirrors that of more than a few Southern cities. And some Northern cities, too.
No, I am not digressing. My point is to suggest that America's original sin -- slavery and racism -- destroyed basic bonds of human affection. Racism was so prevalent for so long that the notion of commonweal has become unthinkable.
When a people has become so accustomed -- so enculturated over centuries -- to thinking that some humans are chattel, that some humans are less than oneself, it becomes impossible to think of anyone as one's brother. And impossible to believe that you are The Other's keeper . . . and he yours.
Is that, ultimately, why Jerry Arbour, the school board president, finds it easy to figuratively throw up his hands and abandon his responsibility to educate the public's children? Is that, ultimately, why Baton Rouge -- why Louisiana -- pretty much always has thrown up its hands and abdicated its responsibility too?
And why, when someone at the capitol gets the notion that the state budget is too big, it's always education, health care and social services that take the big hit?
IF PRESSED by someone up here in Yankeeland to explain my hometown and home state, maybe I'll tell them that to understand Baton Rouge (and Louisiana) you need to understand a city (and a state) that throws its hands up.
Huh?
See, when you're faced with a really big problem -- as most people are sooner or later -- you basically have two choices: You bear down and fix it, or you throw your hands up.
For centuries, when faced with corrupt oligarchs and politicians, what have Louisianians done . . . what do Louisianians do still? They throw their hands up, and the crooked pols are still in charge.
When faced with endemic poverty and social dysfunction? Throw your hands up.
Sputtering economic infrastructure . . . ignorant workforce? Put on a pot of gumbo, grab a six pack of Abita . . . and throw your hands up.
Failing schools? Throw your hands up.
In other words, "It ain't me, it ain't my kin, throw the bastards a voucher and let the private schools clean up the mess."
IFI AM NOT my brother's keeper (if I have no brother, just The Other) there is no such thing as commonweal and -- unless I'm getting directly screwed here -- civic culture and governance ain't my problem. My problem is how to move heaven and earth to get a prime tailgaiting spot at Tiger Stadium.
To be born a Louisianian is to learn not to ask for whom the bell tolls.
An amazing year, a despairing year. A deadly year.
IT -- 1968 WAS -- the year we lost Martin and Bobby, who died 40 years ago today . . . murdered by yet another crazy-mad guy with a gun. Sixty-eight . . . the year of the police riot at the Democratic convention in Chicago.
The year of the Tet Offensive, in which the Viet Cong lost the battle but won the war.
1968. A year of wonder. Apollo 8 and William Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman reading from Genesis as their tiny command module orbited the moon.
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness."
AS THE ASTRONAUTS read words more than half as old as civilization itself -- read from sacred scripture on Christmas Eve -- we saw the Earth rise over the horizon of the moon's surface.
I guess whether you remember 1968 as a year of strife and horror come to our living rooms every night on the evening news or, alternatively, as a year of possibility and wonder depends on whether you were a kid or not. I was a kid and, though the horror was there -- somewhere fuzzy in the background -- what stuck with me was the wonder.
The Wonder Years . . . somebody ought to make a TV show. . . .
I THINK THAT, now, as middle-aged man, is the time I really appreciate the horror on the periphery of my 7-year-old's existence during that fateful year. The gut-wrenching agony of the murdered Martin Luther King Jr. The mind- and soul-numbing senselessness and incalculable loss of another Kennedy gunned down.
I still see, in my mind's eye, the live TV coverage of the funeral train.
All the "what ifs" surrounding all the "never will bes." Possibilities thwarted. Hope denied.
We're due, sometime soon here, for a second-straight evening of Weather From Hell. Welcome to late spring on the Great Plains.
LAST NIGHT, much of Nebraska and Iowa got to pick what was behind one of three curtains -- tornadoes, giant hail or flash flooding. Some contestants got the tornadoes, which -- in some cases -- means you have to give up everything else you've won. Ever.
Others took the giant hail, while many of the remainder ended up with le deluge. A few lucky contestants -- lucky, that is, if you're a masochist -- picked one curtain, then got the other two as parting gifts from a cosmic Monty Hall.
More severe weather and a serious threat of flooding were expected this afternoon and tonight in southeast Nebraska and western Iowa.
Wednesday night, the region was hit with a little bit of everything - heavy rain, hail, wind and, possibly, tornadoes.
Reports of tornadoes came in from the cities of Ceresco, Ulysses and Surprise in Nebraska and from near Glenwood, Red Oak and Malvern in Iowa, said Terry Landsvork, observation program leader at the National Weather Service office in Valley.
Landsvork said Plattsmouth, Neb., and Red Oak, Iowa, each had about 5½ inches of rain.
"They are building an ark in Plattsmouth," he said.
Murray, Neb., and Lincoln both reported hail measuring 1.75 inches in diameter. Reports of 1-inch hail came in from around the Omaha metropolitan area, Landsvork said.
A line of storms packing high winds and some suspected tornadoes ravaged Ceresco, about 15 miles north of Lincoln, about 8:30 p.m. The storm knocked out power, downed trees, blew out windows and blew off part of the roof of the town's only tavern, the Barn Door.
Storm debris was scattered across U.S. Highway 77, the location of the tavern and the Mills Squeegee convenience store. A satellite dish and some cinderblocks were blown off the store's roof.
Just west of town, the metal panels of a farm building were strewn around power poles and across a field. Damage to farm buildings also was reported farther west near Ulysses, Dwight and Valparaiso.
Eugene and Betty Tvrdy lost their century-old wooden barn and a machine shed near their farmhouse west of Ceresco.
One of the couple's goats died during the storm when the barn collapsed, trapping the animals. Nine other goats made it out of the rubble safely, Betty Tvrdy said today.
Two of the couple's missing horses were located this morning on the edge of the farmstead. Both horses appeared unharmed.
The goats and horses are staying with a neighbor today while the Tvrdys survey their damage and meet with insurance adjusters.
(snip)
Tornadoes also were reported in Nebraska near Champion, Maywood, Bertrand, Smithfield, Elwood, Kearney and Wauneta. Nearly a half-dozen funnel clouds were spotted in southwest Iowa.
An acreage about two miles south of Emerson, Iowa, home to a family of four, was wrecked by a tornado. Siding and part of the roof were torn from the house, and windows were broken. Trees were down, and limbs and branches were strewn about.
As the storm moved east in Iowa, it damaged another home and then headed into Montgomery and Union Counties.
Larry Hurst, Mills County emergency management director, said the Emerson family was not injured. "A little shaken, but they were able to get safe shelter."
Two barns and a machine shed also were destroyed on the acreage, said Josh Bowen, a friend of the family.
The tornado was among four or five funnel clouds spotted in Mills County on Wednesday evening. No injuries were reported.
MOST PLACES, springtime is seen as the season of rebirth . . . the season of pleasant weather and the warm up to a summer of fun. And that it is.
But out here on the Plains, springtime also is the season of capricious and violent weather. The season during which you just might get unlucky, with everything you have at 5:15 one hot, humid and blustery afternoon gone with the wind by 5:17.
And you consider yourself blessed because you're alive, and your loved ones are alive. Not all are so lucky, as we have seen across the mid-South and Midwest over and over again this spring. Already.
It gives you something to think about this time of year. And it sends a dry-ice chill right down your spine when the tornado sirens sound and, if you're smart, you grab your pets and your loved ones and dash for the basement.
Omaha has been lucky. We haven't seen The Big One in 33 years. But that last Big One -- an EF-4 (out of 5) -- opened a gash that split the city in half and killed three.
Miraculously, only three.
EVEN TODAY, the 1975 Omaha tornado ranks as the second most costly in American history, having wreaked more than a billion dollars' havoc -- 1.1 billion 1975 dollars.
It's going to be another long night tonight. Hope the garden makes it through again.
The rush of the opportunistic superdelegates toward the inevitable nominee only worsened what was certain to be an unhappy day for the Clintons, who had arrived at their Westchester home at about 3 a.m. after an awkward last day of campaigning in South Dakota. Bill Clinton had flown into a rage and called a reporter a "scumbag." At her last event in South Dakota, Hillary had lost her voice in a coughing fit. Somebody had seen fit to play an inappropriate John Fogerty tune before she took the stage: "It ain't me, it ain't me. I ain't no fortunate one."
On Tuesday evening, the crowd began to assemble at Baruch College in Manhattan for Clinton's non-concession speech. The scene was made to look festive: The Clinton campaign ordered 70 boxes of Domino's pizza for the press corps, and set up a cash bar for its fundraisers, or "honored guests." The honored guests were not in a partying mood, however. One older woman pointed at a reporter accusingly and said: "He is the one who destroyed our heroine!"
A crew from "The Daily Show" joined the party, and, hoping to keep Clinton in the race, struck up a cheer of "Four more months!"
Such an outlandish thing seemed almost plausible among the Clinton backers in the hermetically sealed Baruch gym. Below ground level, there was no cellphone or BlackBerry reception, and there was no television playing in the room. That meant that they could not see the network projections showing that, while Clinton had won South Dakota, Obama had won enough delegates to clinch the nomination. Instead, they listened to Tom Petty's "Won't Back Down."
WHY DO I keep thinking of Baal and golden calves? Or, in this case, a golden ass . . . er, donkey.
Really, though, what more is there to say about the spectacle that is Clinton '08? What words do we have for old women who unselfconsciously go around spouting angry paeans to megalomaniacal Huey Long wannabes in drag?
Is this Bosnia, or what? Run! Run! Snipers! Incoming! Incommmmmiiiinnnnnng!
ONLY ONE THING in particular comes to mind right now -- at least apart from last night's post. It's this: When a society throws the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses overboard in order to set out on a brave, new course, it's not that we mortals get over the need for a deity.
It's just that we'll start to worship any damn thing . . . or politician. Even Hillary Clinton.
Have you ever wondered whether the Clintons are metaphors for America itself? That Bill and Hill are the story of modern (and postmodern) America time-compressed and writ small?
After all, it takes a little story to illustrate a big story, right?
BILL CLINTON was born into a family of modest means . . . and into a world of familial dysfunction, which obviously left its scars on his psyche. Yet, through sheer smarts and epic drive and ambition, he got himself into Georgetown, then into Yale Law, then embarked on a life of the law and public service -- and marriage, family and his own one-man sexual revolution -- until he climbed and clawed and "Comeback Kidded" his way to the top of the world.
From 1993 to 2001, no man on earth was as powerful as William Jefferson Clinton.
And at his side was Hillary. Born Hillary Rodham, the future first lady, U.S. senator and presidential candidate lived a bourgeois life of relative middle-class privilege. And after getting the political bug as a "Goldwater Girl" in 1964, she used her drive and considerable smarts to shine at Wellesley College . . . and then Yale Law, where one of the most formidable political mergers of the modern age took shape.
She helped the family political franchise along through those years of struggle, until reaching the pinnacle of political power with her senior partner, Bill.
SOON, HOWEVER, the ultimate power couple would find that once you get to the top, the only place to go is down.
Clinton, Inc., weathered its own private Vietnam with l'affaire Lewinsky, which left the union -- and the partnership -- bruised and beaten, but intact and ready to begin plotting Hillary's ascent after an eight-year interregnum.
They thought it was "Morning in America." Instead, their trouble was just beginning.
Seventeen months after she sat regally in her New York living room and calmly declared: “I’m in and I’m in to win,” Hillary Clinton stands on a stage in a stifling hot shed in South Dakota, coughing and spluttering, as her daughter, Chelsea, grabs the microphone from her hand to take over the show.
“A long campaign,” the former First Lady chokes out between sips of water. Her husband, red-faced and exhausted – and having just apologised for another angry outburst in front of reporters – looks on wistfully at the final rally of his wife’s presidential bid, an endeavour that has been transformed from an inevitable juggernaut into a costly train wreck.
It was an extraordinary moment, exactly five months after the first contest in Iowa, to see the former First Family in the dying moments of the longest primary campaign in history, a gruelling journey across America that was meant to end in a Clinton restoration and has instead bought a very different inevitability: defeat at the hands of Barack Obama.
(snip)
In this final day of campaigning, Mrs Clinton was still defiant, still giving, as she has done for months, an impressive and detailed stump speech full of uplifting prescriptions for healthcare, taxes and energy independence. Yet there was a sense of a woman with her fingers in a leaking dam, straining to halt the impending flood of super-delegates to her rival. Even as she spoke in Sioux Falls, several of her Democratic Senate colleagues were meeting behind closed doors in Washington to plot the end-game by planning a mass endorsement for Mr Obama.
At two events she became convulsed by coughing fits. At one she got the name of the local mayor wrong. In Yankton, she completely lost her voice and had to leave the stage. Chelsea again took over, the reluctant, largely mute campaigner of Iowa now a star in her own right. During the day Mrs Clinton’s event advance team was laid off. Campaign staff were urged to turn in expense receipts. Young aides were talking about vacations. Several volunteers, amid a slightly hysterical fin de siècle atmosphere, gave Oscar-like speeches listing all the states they had visited.
PERHAPS NO COUPLE has been such poster children for their generation -- and for a whole era of American history -- as the Clintons . . . Bill and Hill. Their motto just as well could have been "You can't touch this," because, well, who could? All good things, however, come to an end eventually. Bill and Hill perhaps knew that in their heart of hearts. But they never saw it coming, not until they were wandering -- shell-shocked and desperate -- through the ruins of the Clinton '08 campaign.
Now the former president and the would-be president appear for all the world like a couple of half-crazed refugees stumbling, glassy-eyed and babbling, out of the ruins of a political Dresden of their own making. Their reputations in tatters, their futures uncertain, they can't help but mindlessly prattle about glorious days still to come.
The world, alas, has moved on.
THE CLINTONS, Bill and Hill, are America. America, behold yourself . . . soon enough.
OK, so Bo Diddley is lip-synching . . . and not all that successfully. And so what if KHJ radio's Sam Riddle don't know Didd-uh-lee squat about how it's important not to overenunciate Did-lee.
(Boss Angeles, my ass.)
There are only two things you need to know about why this is a cool video. One, it's Bo-bobo-bo-bobo-BO! Diddley, dammit!
I shouldn't even be paying much attention to Louisiana at all, being that I've lived in Nebraska for 20 years -- and that the doctors have done all they can do for their patient down south and have turned her over to God.
BUT SINCE there's no equivalent to Al-Anon for Louisiana expatriates . . . and since noting all the crazy-ass things that go on there is a lot easier than trying to dig up such magnificent examples of ridiculousness locally, I therefore am compelled to post the following from WAFB television in Baton Rouge:
At the Capitol, legislators might adopt a daily uniform. Everyone would dress the same, like in school. It sounds silly, but some are already trying it out.
Every woman in the House Transportation Committee wore turquoise and brown Monday. It's no coincidence that they all got a staff memo. "I don't have enough time to think about what I'm going to wear, so the memo saves me that day. I know exactly what I'm going to wear, like a uniform," says Rep. Karen St. Germain of Plaquemine.
(snip)
Men have been matching for years by wearing a dark suit with a patriotic-looking tie or a seersucker suit and boots. So, Representative St. Germain says it's their turn to tie together. "It's a little bit better than standing up and yelling on a hormonal day. This was a lot more effective," she says. St. Germain says it shows solidarity, with a little silliness. "I think it's a little fun in the middle of a long six months of being at the Capitol. We kind of needed something to bring us back to reality. Hey, this is not a bad idea."
GOOD LORD. Even as someone of the male persuasion, I am embarrassed.
"Better than standing up and yelling on a hormonal day"?
These are the people making the call on stuff like cutting social services, health care and higher education. And on "reforming" ethics. Let's not forget ethics.
Imagine a streetcar ride from downtown to the Henry Doorly Zoo along a transformed 10th Street boulevard.
At 10th and Bancroft Streets, a fountain would be the centerpiece of a new roundabout. Signs would help visitors decide whether to go to the zoo, get on Interstate 80, stop at Lauritzen Gardens or head to the new north downtown baseball stadium. Tenth Street would be renamed Parkway 10.
For now, it's all just a pipe dream.
But it's the vision that was shared Monday by Mayor Mike Fahey, City Councilman Garry Gernandt and a number of south Omaha neighborhood leaders.
The first step toward improving the corridors along 10th and 13th Streets is setting new rules and regulations that will preserve the area's character while enhancing it with new lighting, landscaping and attractive development.
The city now has limited control over the type and look of commercial development along those entryways to downtown.
Monday's announcement in the mayor's conference room seemed to demonstrate that Fahey had made amends with the south Omaha neighborhoods. After months of controversy over plans to demolish Rosenblatt Stadium and build a new downtown ballfield, Fahey stood with many of the people who had condemned him earlier this year.
"All was forgiven months and months ago," said Jason Smith, the former Save Rosenblatt leader.
Even as the Rosenblatt fight raged on, neighborhood leaders and the Fahey administration were simultaneously working on the plan for 10th and 13th Streets.
Fahey said that in the seven years since he and Gernandt were elected, Rosenblatt has been the only issue that caused significant disagreement between the two. They have worked together to improve the 24th Street business district, build the new South Omaha Library and construct the Salvation Army's Kroc Center, Fahey said.
"Support for south Omaha has always been an administration goal," Fahey said. He said he remains committed to "improving the look and feel of the entire city."
"WELL," SAYS ANYONE from around these parts. "So?"
Exactly. Here, we had a fairly boilerplate lead story in today's evening edition about cool things the city hopes to do in south Omaha . . . hand in hand with politicians and civic leaders it, two months ago, battled in a nasty guerrilla war over the fate of the neighborhood ball yard.
Albeit a ball yard that seats 23,000 people.
And you know what else? I'll bet these pie-in-the-sky plans actually come to fruition in a few years. Unlike pie-in-the-sky plans regularly floated in other municipalities of my intimate acquaintance.
Working and playing well with others. It's a concept proven to work in contexts other than bribery and kickbacks.
The Devil is in the kudzu, and Satan has surfaced in the swamp this week on the Big Show.
